Costa S. Bahia

Nowadays, children start attending nursery school at an increasingly early age. However, we are still learning how to educate babies in collective environments. Inspired by the bioecological model, nursery school is discussed as a system composed of several subsystems. However, we focus our attention on the family and professional subsystems, focusing on the beliefs and practices that permeate the educational process of children in nursery school. Teachers’ beliefs about working with and for children suggest the development of actions focused on the educational function of daycare. However, when analysing teaching work, it is possible to see that its raison d’être still seems to be based on reasons unrelated to the needs and specificities of the child. Care is still provided with reference to the children’s needs in the family environment, and education, even though it does not work with primary school content, is based on the characteristic model of schooling. The above finding points to the need to broaden the understanding of the inseparability of caring and educating as dimensions inherent to the work and integral development of the child.